


Widow's Walk

by Mhalachai



Series: A Widow's Tale [6]
Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Aliens, All kinds of Asgard, Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-24
Updated: 2013-03-26
Packaged: 2017-12-06 09:37:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/734214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mhalachai/pseuds/Mhalachai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four months after New York, the Avengers are asked to take part in a military briefing at Cheyenne Mountain. It’s perfectly understandable if Natasha has a bad feeling about this...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Writing a crossover in which both canons have a) a Thor and b) Asgard, means one day you have to write a story that actually addresses that issue. Which this will, in part two.

Bruce stared into the open elevator with something approaching resignation.

"You can take the stairs if you want," Natasha said, slipping into the elevator beside Tony and Maria Hill. "It's only twenty-seven stories down."

With a sigh, Bruce shuffled onto the elevator. "That isn't exactly what I'm worried about," he said.

"Cheer up, Doc," Steve said, two steps behind Bruce. The airman, who had been waiting impatiently for the little scene to play out, swiped his card, keyed in a code which Natasha observed without difficulty (Americans, _honestly_ ) and down they went.

Maria Hill, who was rather sanguine about being stuck in a tiny metal box with a potential Hulk, said, "Our meeting with the Air Force should only take a few hours, Dr. Banner."

"What I would love to understand," Tony interrupted from the back of the elevator, "Is why we're even doing this in the first place."

"This meeting was requested by the Pentagon," Steve reminded him.

"And when the Pentagon says 'jump', you say over which building?" Tony asked. He snapped his fingers. "Oh right, you do."

"If you boys don't behave," Natasha said, "I am going to turn this elevator around right now."

Steve didn't get the reference and Tony just made a face, but at least the airman relaxed a bit.

Maria sighed.

After enough of a drop for Natasha's ears to pop, the doors opened into grey cement corridors with exposed piping. This was Cheyenne Mountain, the Air Force's underground base of secrets.

Natasha followed Agent Hill and the airman, Bruce at her side. She'd let Steve corral Tony through the corridors this time.

"You okay?" she asked Bruce, voice pitched for his ears only.

He grimaced. "What do you think?"

She smiled at his tone. "See that air vent there?" she asked, flicking her eyes at a non-descript metal grating as they walked past. "Escape hatch. Rumor has it you can climb twenty-seven stories straight up out to the mountain side."

Bruce frowned at her. "Rumor, huh?"

She kept smiling. "You know how spies talk."

Tony suddenly pushed in between Bruce and Natasha. "What are you kids talking about?" he asked. "Hey, did I tell you Stark Industries built half the monitoring equipment up in NORAD?"

"Four times on the plane," Bruce said, relaxing as Tony's arm bumped against his.

"Did I? Fancy that." Tony elbowed Natasha in the shoulder. "How about--"

"If any part of you touches any part of me again, I will rip it off and sell it on the internet," Natasha said without rancor. Ahead of them, the airman turned a corner, and Natasha frowned slightly. The route they were taking didn't track against what she knew about Cheyenne Mountain. They were headed to the old missile silo, and from her (admittedly outdated) intel about Cheyenne Mountain, there were no meeting rooms in that area.

Tony said something, but Natasha didn't pay attention as her senses went on alert. The deeper they got into the mountain, the more things seemed … off. The American soldiers down here wore different uniforms, black-on-black, interspersed amongst the more traditional Air Force blue and Marine green.

Natasha glanced at the rank patches of a passing group of soldiers. A captain, a major, and a staff-sergeant from various branches of the military, more interested in goggling Captain America than anything.

The ranks were trending too high for this to be a regular military post.

Tony jabbed her arm with a finger. "What's with the spy laser gaze?" he asked.

Natasha made herself relax, tossing her hair over her shoulder and smiling brightly at Tony, distracting the soldiers walking past. "I don't know what you're talking about," she said, still smiling.

Tony looked downright perturbed. Bruce sighed. "This was not our best idea," he muttered.

The airman stopped and waited for the group to catch up before opening a door. Deputy Director Hill was first into the room in case of any danger. Natasha followed when she saw Maria flash the all-clear signal. Not that the boys would have understood, but Natasha had spent over ten years in SHIELD and in spite of everything, if she couldn't have Clint Barton at her side, Maria Hill was an acceptable back-up agent. So when Natasha entered the room, she wasn't expecting any danger.

What she got was worse.

"General Jack O'Neill," she said. Of course. She put a bit of sway in her walk, just for old time's sake. "Fancy meeting you here."

The man in question, greyer of hair than the last time she'd seen him in a San Francisco hospital, narrowed his eyes at her. "Natasha." It was more challenge than greeting. "You look… okay."

"You too." And he did, in his Air Force blues. He was aging handsomely, and well, she'd always had a thing for old soldiers.

Jack glared at her for another moment, then turned his gaze to Maria. "Deputy Director Hill."

"General O'Neill," Maria said, standing ramrod straight. "Thank you for arranging this meeting."

"Yeah, well, an alien invasion in New York can open so many doors," Jack said. Natasha hid a smirk. She well remembered that snarky tone of his. "So, who'd you bring?"

Introductions were duly made, hands shaken, and Steve very nearly saluted the General. Then Jack turned to the only other person in the room, a man in spectacles and civilian clothes. "This is Dr. Daniel Jackson. Daniel, everyone."

Dr. Jackson nodded at the group. "Hello." He shook hands with Bruce, then Steve. By this point, Tony had grown bored and wandered over to poke at the large glass divider by the shuttered bay windows.

There was a moment of awkward silence, then Jack said, "Daniel's a linguist." He turned to Daniel. "Natasha's Russian."

Natasha glared at Jack, because really, _now_? But Daniel lit up, saying to her in flawless Russian, "How are you finding your visit to the Mountain?"

"It has been uneventful, so far," Natasha replied in kind, putting on her best Muscovite accent. "Have you worked with the General for a long time?"

"Long enough to know that he's doing this because he knew it will irritate you and distract me."

Natasha smiled. "You know him so well."

The door on the other side of the room opened, and out came another general, then, surprisingly, a man whom Natasha had met years before, when she had been in Colorado Springs to visit her son. At the time, John had said the man's name was Murray. Only now she could see the gleaming gold symbol on ‘Murray's' forehead, and she very much doubted that his name was that American.

The man gave her a grave nod. Then he glanced over her shoulder, and like a suggestible child, Natasha turned around.

Her son stood in the doorway.

Natasha's insides turned to ice as she stared at John Sheppard. All those months without contact, in which Natasha had just assumed that John was away on his usual deployments, suddenly turned sinister.

John was _wrong_ and it took her a heartbeat to realize that he looked nearly a decade younger and fifteen pounds lighter than the last time she had seen him.

John took in the room's occupants without reacting and made his way to the far side of the table, setting a folder down and straightening it automatically.

Heart pounding, Natasha walked around the table. HYDRA agents could have popped out of the ceiling and Natasha might not have noticed. As she got closer to John, she could see the toll that had been taken on him; he had dark circles under his eyes, from stress or illness she could not tell, and his cheekbones were sharp. His uniform hung straight, however, and it took Natasha another glance to realize that a small metal eagle was pinned to his shoulder where a silver leaf had once been.

"Colonel Sheppard," Natasha said evenly, folding her hands together to stop herself from touching John, her son, her baby.

"Agent Romanoff," he responded. He pushed the chair out of his way and leaned on the table, deliberately putting his back to the room.

Natasha took in a breath and let it out so she didn't start screaming. "What happened to you?"

John shrugged. "You know what they say," he said, trying to sound casual. "Being held as a guest of the enemy can take ten years off your life."

His voice never wavered as he held her gaze; his eyes weighed down with pain and loss. Natasha wrapped her emotions into a knot, pushing away the urge to kill.

"Who were they?" Natasha asked. Across the room, Tony was staring at her, frowning, while Bruce spoke to him softly. They wouldn't be able to stop her if she wanted to leave, to seek out the people who had _hurt her son_ \--

John smiled, and the expression was sharp with comprehension. "Don't worry about it, they're all dead anyway." He shoved his hands into his pockets, ruining the lines of his uniform.

Natasha breathed for a moment, struck by the sudden similarity John had to his father in this moment, and feeling unexpected grief for a man so many years dead. "I see you've been promoted."

John's expression grew dark. "Yeah, how about that?" he said, sarcasm coating his words. "They take away my city and kick me up the chain of command, seems a fair trade."

It took Natasha a moment to realize what he meant. "They took you off your project?" she demanded. "What about Torren? Teyla and your team?"

"Back on the expedition like they should be," John said, and there was danger in every word.

"What are you doing now?" Natasha asked.

John spread his hands wide. "Colonel Sheppard, in charge of the Independent Projects Division. And by ‘division' I mean me and whoever else has pissed off the General that week."

"What does independent projects even mean?"

"It's other duties as required." John tugged his jacket down. "Look, can we talk about something else? Like, what the hell happened in New York?"

"John--"

His jaw clenched. "I saw footage of some crazy lady flying an alien hovercraft, what's up with that?"

Natasha understood the pain of talking about a broken mission, of losing everyone you cared about, and had to push down every maternal instinct she had. They weren't in a place where they could speak freely about anything. Instead, Natasha sat on the table edge beside John, trusting Steve to watch her back for a few minutes, and pulled a knife from her forearm sheath. She whirled the blade around and mimed stabbing it into an alien's body. "You know, trying to catch a ride in Midtown, the usual."

John took the knife and balanced it in his hand. "Nice edge," he said appreciatively. "What's this made of?"

"An experimental alloy," she said. "You want it? I missed your birthday this year."

"Nah, I'm good," John said, handing back the weapon. He hesitated. "Look, I heard about Coulson. I'm sorry about that."

It was Natasha's turn to shrug. "Line of duty," she said in way of explanation, because Phil Coulson had been dead for six months and his absence, after ten years in her life, still hurt in ways she hadn't thought possible. "It happens."

"Yeah," John commiserated. "How's Barton? I thought you guys were still working together?"

"We are," Natasha said, pushing her emotions back behind the walls in her mind. Absently, she noted Bruce was headed in her direction. "Clint begged off this trip. He hates being underground."

"Wait, that was an option?" Bruce interjected.

Natasha slid off the table, placing her hand on John's arm. For all of his slenderness, he was reassuringly solid under her grip. "Colonel John Sheppard, I'd like you to meet Dr. Bruce Banner."

John stood. "Dr. Banner, it's good to meet you," he said. He shook Bruce's hand, obviously making Bruce a little uneasy. "Your paper in ‘eight-seven on transverse dimensional quantum fields was the only reason I survived my thesis."

Bruce eased his shoulders down. "I didn't think anyone actually read that," he said.

"I liked how you dealt with the difficulties around trying to play with particle physics without destroying the accelerator," John said. At Natasha's raised eyebrows, he added, "What?"

"It's just the idiot flyboy facade makes it easy to forget you have a masters' degree in applied physics," Natasha said.

"Shh," John said. "I keep that stuff quiet around here."

"Why?" Bruce asked.

"Managing expectations," Natasha answered. "Make people think you're harmless so they don't expect you to catch on too quickly to what they're up to."

Bruce looked amused. "Does anyone fall for that with you?"

Natasha tilted her head and smiled her most vacuous American smile. "Every day of the week." She caught Steve's eye, and waved him over. "There's someone I want you to meet," she said to John.

He glared down at her. "I hate you."

"I know you do." She turned as Steve loomed. "Captain Steve Rogers, I'd like you to meet Colonel John Sheppard."

Steve, who had been reaching out with his usual bored air of meet-and-greet, checked his outstretched hand and stared at her, surprised. Then he looked at John again in a new light.

Of course, Natasha mused. In a moment of emotional weakness the previous month, she'd made the mistake of telling Steve about John. But there was nothing to be done about that now.

"Colonel Sheppard," Steve said with enthusiasm. "It's good to meet you."

"Likewise," John said, doing his best to appear laid-back and nonchalant.

Natasha ruined that by saying, "John was a big Captain American fan when he was a child--"

John froze, his ears going red in embarrassment. "Okay, _stop_ ," he said in a rush. "I will pay you to stop talking."

"What?" Natasha said, noting how Steve also looked embarrassed, while Bruce was trying to hide his smile. "It's true."

John pointed at a corner of the room. "I'm going to go over there and die of humiliation."

Natasha swatted his arm. "Do it quietly, it's a bad idea to bother the Generals with self-immolation."

The room was beginning to fill up, with the Americans taking seats around the large table. Maria was involved in a conversation with Daniel Jackson, and that left Tony Stark standing alone by the wall, hands in his pockets.

Natasha's attention narrowed. Tony on his own was never a good sign. Tony alone in a room full of military personnel with mysterious purpose was a recipe for disaster.

But Tony was watching the Avengers gather around John Sheppard, an odd expression on his face. And maybe it was Natasha's imagination, but John was being very careful to avoid looking at the corner of the room where Tony had perched.

Strange.

The other general in the room cleared his throat. "I'd like to get started," he said, and everyone found a seat around the table. Natasha ended up between Bruce and 'Murray', with John across the table from her. He appeared less than pleased at being seated next to Tony Stark.

Who was now pretending John didn't exist.

Natasha could feel the stabbing pain of a headache start to build.

The general began. "I'm General Landry, and I'd like to thank you for joining us today."

"On behalf of SHIELD," Maria replied, "We are glad this meeting could finally take place."

Natasha settled back to watch the show.

General Landry looked at Jack. "I'll let General O'Neill start."

Jack slouched in his chair. "So. Since you guys started the summer off with aliens in New York, we thought we should have a little chat in case you ever feel like doing it again."

Steve sat up straight. "Since _we_ started the summer off with aliens?" he repeated.

"Yeah," Jack said, unrepentant. "There are some existing programs that you should know about so we don't have a repeat of five guys in spandex running around saving the world by themselves."

"Five guys and a girl," Natasha interjected.

"In spandex," Jack repeated. He turned to Daniel Jackson. "Doc?"

Dr. Jackson straightened up. "Briefly put," he said, "In 1928 in Egypt, an expedition uncovered a large stone ring of unknown origin, the purpose of which was discovered in 1994 by a group of American military scientists and um, myself."

Natasha's eyes widened. The whirling tendrils of memory and deduction pulled together in her head; The talk of aliens; the occurrences in San Francisco and Area 51 in 2009; the incident over the Antarctic plains in 2004. Combined with an _archeologist_ at a military base and the mention of a 1928 expedition and the stone ring in Egypt, which was legend in Soviet intelligence circles long before Natasha was born -- Natasha suspected she knew what was about to happen.

Dr. Jackson pressed a button on his tablet. A glittering gold hologram of a ring appeared over the table, rotating gently in place. "The people who once used it called this the _Chappa'ai_ , which translates to Stargate."

Bruce sat upright, reaching for his glasses. "And things being what they are," he said, interrupting Dr. Jackson's narrative, "That's a literal description?"

Steve frowned at Bruce's tone. "What does that mean, Doc?"

Tony ran his hand through his hair, destroying the perfectly gelled coif. "That means that SHIELD is about eighteen years behind the curve."

Steve's frown deepened.

Natasha cleared her throat. "Gate is sometimes just another word for doorway," she said, and in a moment, understanding dawned in Steve's eyes. Natasha's stomach cramped, memories of the Tesseract dancing in her head, of the portal open over New York, and she was suddenly very glad that Clint wasn't with them on this mission.

"And haven't we had enough of those for the year," Tony muttered. He reached for the hologram, but his fingers slid through the glowing gold light. "This technology is from the dark ages. How do you steer this thing?"

John took the tablet from Dr. Jackson. He tapped at the screen, and the gold hologram expanded to fill the room. Natasha could see the detail on the ring, esoteric shapes etched onto the hard material.

"This is massively unfair," Tony groused, a hand ghosting over one of the symbols. "The US Military has had access to this kind of technology since the _nineties_ and no one ever thought to bring me into this? What the hell kinds of markings are these?" Before anyone could say anything, he snapped his fingers. "Are these constellations?" he asked, jabbing finger through the hologram.

"Why would you say that?" Natasha asked.

The look Tony gave her was condescension overlain with pity. "Because that? Is Orion. How else are you going to map something across space if you're not using a star map?" he asked.

"How does it work?" Bruce asked, pinning Dr. Jackson with a gaze that was too intense for Natasha's comfort. "I assume that this ‘Gate' opens both ways."

Dr. Jackson glanced at Jack O'Neill, who shrugged. "The Stargate operates off the principle of wormhole physics for interstellar travel," Dr. Jackson said.

"Wonderful. More aliens trying to kill us," Tony snarked. "Seriously, why didn't anyone bring Stark Industries into this program back when you first opened it? We've been improving military technology since before I was born."

John rolled his eyes. "Because," he said, addressing Tony for the first time. "There's no ‘K' in Stargate, Stark."

Tony looked at John with the singular expression of a man who had just seen a chimpanzee behind the wheel of an automobile. "I'm sure you can shove one up in there if you push hard enough, Colonel."

Maria leaned forward and cut into the fray before any violence could start. "General O'Neill," Maria said firmly, drawing everyone's attention. "You're reading us in on your project for what I'm sure are concrete reasons."

"Sure are," Jack replied. He glanced at John, who swiped at the tablet, causing the hologram to vanish. "It's less about the Stargate itself, and more about what we found on the other side."

"Aliens," Tony interjected, drumming his fingers on the tabletop. "Why else would we be having this charming conversation so soon after the Chitauri attacked New York?"

"Tony," Natasha murmured. The man fixed her with a glare, but at her expression, he closed his mouth and sat back. "What's the current threat assessment?"

Jack put his hand on the thick folder in front of him. "Currently? We're doing okay."

"How have we done in the past?" Natasha asked.

"We've... kept a lid on things."

Natasha was not reassured. "Any aliens in particular we should know about?"

Jack inclined his head towards the man at Natasha's side. "Teal'c? You want to fill the lady in?"

Teal'c, as ‘Murray' was apparently known, sat up. He was nearly the size of Steve Rogers, but he carried an ominous stillness about him that Steve lacked. "I am Teal'c," he began. "I was once a Jaffa in service to the false god Apophis, and I now serve my people and the Taurii, what we call your people."

Across the table, Steve's eyes grew wide. "You're an alien?" Steve blurted out, which made Tony roll his eyes. "Sorry, it's just— "

"He's new around here," Tony explained.

Teal'c inclined his head. "You should know of the Goa'uld System Lords who once ruled this galaxy. They have been defeated and no longer pose a threat to the Taurii, yet their impact on the people of this galaxy is not insignificant."

"What do they look like?" Maria asked.

"Like us," Jack said. Natasha raised her eyebrows at him. "No, really. See, the Goa'uld are little parasitic alien snakes that get into your head and wrap about your brainstem to control your body. Nasty little bastards."

"They can control people?" Maria demanded. "Is there any outward indication that someone has been infected?"

"Nope," Jack said. "Not if they want to blend in. They can access a person's memory and pretend to be them, while the parasite is in charge."

Natasha laid her hands flat on the table. "Parasitic aliens can infect people and not give any indication, and you don't consider this to be a threat?" she demanded.

"Relax, we got most of them."

"Most isn't all." Natasha's brain whirled with the possibilities. An agent who could infiltrate the enemy camp by _infiltrating the enemy_ was a truly terrifying thought. "Are there any physical indications?"

"There can be a metallic voice thing going on when they're in egomaniac mode," Jack said. "There's also a glowing eye thing, that's a bit of a give-away."

 _Glowing eyes_. Natasha's breath caught in her throat, memory of trauma wrapped in brutality crashing over her, but Jack was still talking and she needed to pay attention, she had to _pay attention_.

"The good news is that the Goa'uld are usually too much into their own power trip to hide themselves. They masqueraded as gods for a reason."

Maria held up her hand. "Are you aware of any of these aliens currently operating on Earth?" she asked. "Is there any reason to think of this species as a domestic threat?"

"It is unlikely," Teal'c said. "The Stargate remains the main method of travel across this galaxy, and satellites monitoring your planet would be able to detect any ship approaching the Earth."

"For the last eighteen years," Natasha said. Everyone looked at her. "If you've only known what the Stargate can do for the last eighteen years, some of these aliens could have come here before, right?"

In her head, emotion and memory were causing her body to pump adrenaline into her bloodstream, a physical reaction to the visceral memory of glowing eyes and a metallic voice, of a knife and pain and searing cold.

Yet she kept her face expressionless as Jack acknowledged the possibility, as Tony fidgeted in his seat and Steve looked confused, as John stared at her with his father's eyes and saw nothing.

"It could happen, but it's not likely," Dr. Jackson said.

"But you'd only need to infect the right person," Tony said. "Take me, for instance."

Steve cleared his throat. "Stark— "

"He's right," John said, surprising Natasha. "A Goa'uld infects Tony Stark, who has access to the Iron Man suit, let alone the backing of Stark Industries, and you've got a perfect storm of one person literally being able to take over the world."

"Excuse me, we don't manufacture weapons anymore," Tony interrupted.

"You make arc reactors and pharmaceuticals, you could swap that back to weapons in less than a week," John snapped back. "Let alone the part of the equation where you weaponized _yourself_."

Tony turned in his chair to glare at John. "You spend a lot of time thinking about how I can take over the world, Sheppard?"

"No, just about how it's extremely difficult for a weapons maker to change his spots," John shot back.

Tony's eyes went wide and he opened his mouth to retort, but Natasha was officially done with this conversation. She stood, walked over to the side of the room where there was a coffee carafe and china mugs, using the interruption to breathe around the fight-or-flight reaction to the conversation.

Decades had passed, but she remembered the man with glowing eyes and the metallic voice as if it was yesterday, remembered how he manipulated people into sacrificing their own lives for his whim.

She remembered how she had pretended to be taken in by him, remembered how he had reacted when she'd been found out.

She remembered the fury with which he had fallen upon her, beating her with his fists and then with the handle of her own pistol before he reached for his knife.

Hands steady as she poured a cup of coffee, she almost gagged at the memory of blood in her mouth choking her, as he pulled back her head to slit her throat, how he hesitated just for a moment, eyes going gold as he—

The door to the room opened and in walked a female Air Force Colonel, tall and blonde. Natasha didn't react in time, stuttering in the Colonel's path with her coffee cup and her flashback, making the Colonel need to step around her, a hand brushing Natasha's wrist when Natasha moved the wrong way.

"Excuse me," the woman said with a smile, and Natasha's heart rate exploded at the touch of the woman's skin on hers (eyes gold but no this woman had blue eyes and her voice held no knife's edge but the touch had been the same, the same).

And the woman was gone, moving around the table like she belonged there, and no one was acting as if anything was wrong, and how would they know? Jack himself had said there was no way to determine if a person was infected with a parasitical alien if the alien didn't want to be found out.

(The woman was seven feet and three inches from Natasha's son.)

Heart racing, muscles cramping with adrenaline, Natasha returned to her seat, hands steady as she placed her coffee cup on the table and lowered herself into the chair.

(The woman was seven feet and three inches from Natasha's son, and Tony Stark was the only thing between them and he wasn't in the suit and was thus defenseless.)

Beside her, Bruce coughed and shifted in his chair.

Natasha had her knives. She could jump across the table and decapitate the woman without anyone being quick enough to stop her, if the woman made a move towards John or Tony or Steve. The Hulk could take care of Bruce and Maria was on the far side.

(The woman shifted in her seat and was now seven feet and one inch from Natasha's son.)

Jack O'Neill was talking and Tony kept interrupting and Bruce had clenched his fist in his lap and that wasn't right but there was a woman in the room whose touch had been electric, like the touch of a man decades before with golden eyes and a voice like a knife's blade, a man who had turned on her with an animal fury.

(The woman was speaking and her voice held no sharpness but she was too close to Tony and)

"Nat," John said sharply into the room. Natasha's attention snapped to her son before she could stop herself, a potentially fatal mistake with a woman in the room whose touch had been electric. "Sam's not a threat."

On the last word, everyone reacted. Tony swung around to stare at the woman at his side, Steve straightened up in his chair, Maria looked around, and Bruce—

Letting out a breath, Natasha put her hand on Bruce's forearm, feeling the muscles and tendons in his arm solid with tension.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Natasha said, keeping her voice light and slightly puzzled, even as she slid her hand down to Bruce's wrist. His skin was hot and dry but there was no tint of green, not now, not yet.

"Colonel Carter is not a Goa'uld," John went on, his hands flat on the table, unthreatening.

"What?" the woman said, looking at Natasha with wide eyes. "Sheppard, what are you talking about?"

"I think Agent Romanoff has encountered a Goa'uld before," John said, never taking his eyes off Natasha.

Natasha raised a warning eyebrow at John. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"I think you do," John shot back.

"Sheppard, what's going on?" Jack asked quietly.

"Just that I think Agent Romanoff has a bit more experience with Goa'uld than we'd have thought, sir."

Tony rolled his chair away from the woman Sam. "So if the Colonel here isn't one of these alien people," he said, "Why does Romanoff thinks she is?"

The undercurrents in the room were loud enough to make Natasha's head ache, tendrils and hints, and it may have been something in John's eyes that made Natasha pull it all together into a singular, horrifying picture. "She was," Natasha said, unable to stop herself from tightening her grip on Bruce's wrist. "That's why you said she isn't a Goa'uld. You mean she isn't one now."

A moment's stillness, in which Natasha realized she was right. The woman had once been a Goa'uld, and was no longer.

Natasha hadn't been wrong.

Bruce put his free hand on the back of Natasha's hand, squeezing gently, and she realized she'd dug her nails into his skin. She let go, pressing her hand flat against her leg.

The blonde woman didn't seem irritated or angered; rather, she looked at Natasha with a frank curiosity. "How did you know?" she asked.

Natasha breathed in and out, her limbs aching with the unused adrenaline.

"Yes, Agent Romanoff, how did you know?" Jack interjected, his voice laced with just enough sarcasm to set Natasha's teeth on edge. "You've been holding out on us."

"Don't I always?" Natasha shot back at him. "It's complicated."

Jack spread his hands wide as he leaned back in his chair. "Feel free to enlighten us, the room is booked ‘til five."

Natasha glared at Jack out of habit, then glanced at her teammates. Steve was full of upright resolve, Bruce was no longer clenching his fist, and Tony was too quiet for her taste.

Taking a deep breath, Natasha directed her story at John, even though she kept her eyes on the woman. "Several years ago, I was assigned a mission to infiltrate the compound of a man, one who my superiors suspected of kidnapping civilians."

Her mind was speaking to her in Russian, and it was an effort to translate the words for the American audience.

"Human trafficking?" John asked.

"We initially thought so, only on closer examination, we discovered that all the missing people were in the compound in Belarus, and they appeared to have been brainwashed."

"How many people were in the compound?" Steve asked.

"I only ever saw about a hundred, but I suspected that there may have been more underground in the areas I couldn't gain access to."

"What happened?" Jack asked.

"My cover was broken," Natasha explained. "Before I could get out, the leader captured me and attempted to get me to talk. When he was alone with me, his eyes were gold and his voice changed."

She kept her gaze level with Jack, not curling in on herself no matter how much the memories of the torture fell upon her. She was Natalia Romanova, the Black Widow, and her memories did not control her.

Dr. Jackson cleared his throat. "When did this happen?"

Natasha let out a breath. This was exactly what she had wanted to avoid. Jack knew she was older than she appeared, as did John and Steve. Maria had to know, given her access to Natasha's file. But that left a handful of these strangers who had no right to know such things about Natasha.

But there was no walking away from it now.

"It was 1976," she said. "In the winter."

Winter in Belarus, miles outside of Minsk, and she had crawled out of that burning compound covered in blood not her own. She had nearly died before a ghost walked out of a blizzard and carried her to safety.

"Did he have a name?" Teal'c asked suddenly. "This man of whom you speak."

"He called himself Seth."

The room lit up with an electric charge. Jack's eyes flashed with anger. But John.... was nodding?

"What?" Natasha asked.

"We got him," John said. "Well, not me, but these guys."

Natasha frowned. "No, I killed him in 1976." Her hand ached with the memory of gripping the man's knife, stabbing him in the gut, in the face, anywhere she could reach.

She'd crawled out of the burning compound covered in the blood of a psychopath, and had never once in thirty-six years thought she needed to look over her shoulder.

"Was this him?" John asked, poking at the tablet. A photograph appeared projected on the far wall, of a man with dark hair.

Natasha shook her head. "No, that wasn't..." She looked again, digging into her memories, past the haze of the pain and the beating, the helplessness of knowing that she was going to die. "That wasn't Seth, that was Viktor, one of his confidants."

Dr. Jackson tapped his fingers against his coffee cup, his brow furrowed in thought. "If Seth was close enough to death in 1976, he would have jumped to a new host," he said slowly. "How badly injured was he?"

Natasha let out a breath over the remembered stench of blood and viscera. "He wasn't going anywhere when I left. I was certain he was dead."

His eyes had been open wide and glassy as Natasha dragged herself from the room and out into the cold, one arm broken, ribs smashed in, a weight in her gut as blood pooled inside her skin. She had seen so many men in death, and it had never occurred to her for an instant that Seth was anything but.

Natasha's skin crawled at the idea that such a monster had walked upon the earth and she had not known.

"What does this have to do with how you knew Sam used to be a host?" John asked, bringing the question back around.

Natasha settled back in her chair, crossing her hands across her stomach to keep them from trembling. "I could feel it."

"Like some alien parasite vibe?" Tony asked, unable to keep silent any longer. "What's that like, does it taste like cinnamon?"

"It's just a feeling," Natasha said, loath to describe the metallic shiver down her spine, the worms crawling in her belly.

The woman stood up. "Are you getting that feeling from anyone else at the table?" she asked, walking around to the far wall and picking up a small case from the tabletop.

Natasha shook her head. "Should I be?" she asked, voice tight. If there was another Goa'uld in this room and John hadn't said anything, she was going to have to have a serious talk with the man.

"No," the woman said. She returned to her seat and opened the case. Inside lay a solid cylinder of metal, shining dully in the light. "How about now?"

Tony reached for the cylinder. "What is this?" he demanded, turning it over.

"It's naquada," John said, yanking it out of Tony's grasp. He rolled it across the table to Natasha.

The moment she touched the metal, the memories of 1976 hit her again, only harder this time. She breathed around the remembrance of blood in her mouth as she tightened her grip on the metal.

 _Naquada_.

"Why?" she asked, something thick in her mouth. It took her a moment to realize the blood in her mouth wasn't a memory; she'd bitten through her lip when the naquada had touched her skin.

Someone was taking the metal bar from her. Teal'c had gently removed the cylinder from her hand and was passing it to Dr. Jackson; the woman appeared stricken, and John....

John was looking at her with no expression on his face, but a cold anger burning in his eyes.

"We need to take a break," Steve said abruptly, standing up. "Is there a room we can use?"

Natasha stood under her own power, conscious that Bruce had his hand on her lower back as he guided her out of the room, behind Steve.

They ended up in a small suite down the hall, just the five of them from SHIELD. Tony closed the door behind Maria and said, "Okay, what the fucking hell was that?"

Natasha made it to the nearby sink before she threw up.

Someone was holding her hair, a hand on her hip keeping her upright. Someone was speaking in her ear. Bruce, from the timbre of the voice. Her stomach heaved again, and she spat bile into the sink.

"Come on," Bruce said gently, guiding her upright. "Let's wash your hands first."

He turned the taps on hot and gave her the soap from the small dish, letting her scrub at the palm of her hand where she had held the bar of naquada.

The sensation of the metal wasn't coming off with soap alone. Natasha dropped the soap into the sink and scrubbed at her palm with her fingernails.

"Natasha, you've got it," Bruce said in that same wounded-animal voice, pulling her hands out from the water stream. "Drink this."

Natasha took the glass from Bruce, rinsed her mouth out, feeling the sting of the cold water against the bite on her lip. She spat a mouthful of blood and bile into the sink, and took another drink.

Slowly, the reaction faded.

Natasha wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "I apologize for the outburst," she said after a moment, still hunched over the sink.

"Don't worry about it," Steve said. "Take a minute, okay?"

But Natasha didn't want to take a minute, didn't want to admit weakness in front of these men. She straightened up, swallowed around the blood in her mouth, and wiped her hands on her jeans. "I'm fine," she lied.

Bruce handed her another glass of water. "Have you ever reacted to a metal like that?" he asked. Natasha shook her head. "Not even vibranium? Because there's not a lot of unknown metal elements lying around the planet."

"No, not vibranium," Natasha said. "Steve's shield doesn't do anything to me."

"Ouch, that has to hurt the ego," Tony said in Steve's direction. "Sort of like thinking you'd killed the big bad wolf and then finding out he was just some sort of meat puppet for an alien worm?" he directed at Natasha.

"Tony," Bruce said warningly. "I'll see if I can get a sample of the metal to test back at the Tower, if that's okay with Natasha."

Maria, who had been standing at the side of the room with her arms crossed over her chest, said, "Agent Romanoff, status?"

"I'm fine," Natasha said again, and this time it didn't feel like such a lie. "This afternoon has been... unexpected."

"Well, aliens," Tony said. "No one expects aliens in the U.S. Air Force."

Natasha ran her hand through her hair, breathing out. Steve reached out to touch her arm. His skin on hers was warm and comforting. "Are you able to continue?" he asked, voice all business.

Natasha nodded. "Just what every agent wants, to freak out in a room of Air Force generals," she said. "And John."

Tony made a curious noise. "Wait, _John_? Since when are you and Sheppard on a first-name basis?"

Natasha looked at Tony, annoyed, because what did he know about John Sheppard? But before she could say anything, Tony's eyes went wide and he made a flapping motion with his hands.

"You, oh god _you_ , that's why he called you Nat," Tony said, covering his mouth with one hand. "You're Natalie Sheppard?"

Natasha shoved the glass of water at Steve. "What are you talking about?" she demanded. She'd never expected to hear that name again, and to have it thrown at her by Tony Stark of all people made her skin crawl.

Tony backed away from Natasha's approach. "John had a picture of his dead mother in his dorm room in college, and it's you," he said accusingly. "With the hair and the face and the..." He made a hand motion, sketching the general outline of a woman's torso. "...eyes, it's totally you!"

"When were you in John's dorm room?" Natasha asked heatedly.

"Like, 1989? I have like six PhDs, you think I could pull all that off at MIT?" Tony asked, backing into a wall.

"You met John at Stanford?" Natasha demanded, coming to a stop within striking distance of Tony. He looked down at her, eyes wide.

"If by John you mean _your son_ , then yes," Tony said. He looked over Natasha's head at the rest of the room. "Why do the rest of all you look like that?"

"Like what?" Bruce asked.

Tony made another flailing gesture at Natasha. "She pretty much admitted that she has a forty-two-year-old son, and none of you have so much as an expression!"

Steve shrugged. "It doesn't seem the sort of thing that's all that surprising, is all," he said awkwardly.

Natasha wanted to sigh at Steve's attempt to keep a confidence. "I told Steve about John last month," she told Tony. "Let it go."

"Let it go?" Tony repeated. He looked over at Bruce and Maria. "What about you two? You're good with the tiniest member of the team suddenly being someone's babymama?"

"Don't you ever listen to Natasha talk?" Bruce asked. "Her speech patterns only make sense if she was born before 1960." He gave her an apologetic glance. "Sorry."

Natasha blinked at Bruce. "I could just have Russian as my primary language," she said, a little unnerved that he had been _making deductions_ about her.

"That would result in a whole different linguistic pattern," Bruce said.

Maria smirked. Of course, Maria had read Natasha's file, had been a junior agent when Barton and Coulson threw Natasha into SHIELD ten years previous. If she hadn't known about John before, it was only a matter of time before Fury would read her into Natasha's entire file.

Tony threw his hands into the air. "What about Barton, does he know about little Johnny Boo Boo too?"

"What do you think?" Natasha asked. "And why are you so fixated on this? Why aren't you more interested on the concept of space travel and aliens by the U.S. military?"

"Please, aliens are so last month," Tony scoffed. He shoved his hands into his suit pockets and stared at Natasha, his expression changing to one of mischief. "So. Just to be clear."

Natasha waited for it.

"How are you likely to react to any MILF jokes?"

"With your immediate defenestration," Natasha snapped, advancing on Tony again. He ducked around Steve.

"Really?" Tony asked. "Because I've got a great one with a rabbi and a goat."

"MILF?" Steve said to Bruce.

Bruce hunched his shoulders awkwardly. "I'll explain on the plane," he said.

"No, Tony's going to explain that one to Steve," Natasha said, getting around Steve. "And I'm going to be there to watch."

"Come on, not even once?" Tony teased. "Just for old time's sake?" Natasha nearly had him, when the door to the room opened and John Sheppard stepped inside. Quick as a flash, Tony ducked behind John, hauling the man bodily between him and Natasha. "Think fast, Sheppard."

"Why, what did you do?" John asked Tony over his shoulder.

Natasha watched Tony's expression change as he worked through the possible scenarios of explanation. "Um, nothing." He let go of John's jacket and stepped back.

John turned to Natasha. "Are you going to be okay?" he asked.

Natasha nodded.

Not satisfied, John looked around the rest of the room, taking in the occupants. He let out a sigh. "The generals broke for a discussion, mostly about Russia and Seth and things, but they're back in an hour if you want to keep going."

"Of course," Natasha said immediately. "We need to conclude the briefing."

"Are you going to be alright with that?" Tony asked. Natasha turned to glare at him. "I mean, of course you're going to be alright with that, Agent Romanoff."

"I'm curious about how Natasha knew about Colonel Carter's situation," Bruce said, leaning against the wall. "And how it's connected to her reaction to the metal bar."

"The naquada," John said. He smoothed out the wrinkles Tony had left in his jacket. "The Goa'uld we've encountered had small traces of naquada in their systems. If they're in a host long enough, or the parasite dies in the host, the naquada in their systems is enough to be sensed by another host."

Tony raised his eyebrows. "Are you trying to say that Mommy's an alien?" he asked.

John shot him an annoyed glance. "No, Stark. Maybe she's a little more perceptive than you."

"That's not hard," Maria said under her breath, barely loud enough for Natasha to hear.

Bruce turned to Natasha. "Are you able to sense different types of metals?" he asked.

Natasha held in the urge to glare at her son. She wasn't exactly thrilled that her secrets were being thrown out into the open in front of other people, even her teammates. "In the past, with certain metals, yes," she said cautiously.

"Like with Seth?" John asked.

"Like with Seth," Natasha agreed. There was something else, something hovering on the edge of her consciousness, something that had been there since the bar of naquada metal had hit her hand. Something that made her wonder if she had sensed a Goa'uld before Seth, something buried in her memory beyond where she could reach it.

Or some memory stripped away from her, in all the years of being unmade in the Red Room.

Taking a breath, Natasha pushed down her uncertainty. The question had nothing to do with the immediate situation, and she could revisit it later, when she wasn't balancing on a blade's edge between her teammates and her son.

"So when you came into contact with Sam, you sensed the remnants of naquada in her system, thought she was a Goa'uld, and reacted accordingly," John summarized. He shrugged. "There you go. It's not that hard to understand."

Steve was watching Natasha closely. "You said you thought you killed Seth," he said.

"So?"

"Why did you try to kill him?"

Natasha rubbed her palm against her jeans. The remembered feel of the naquada burned like acid against her skin. She wanted to be elsewhere, anywhere else, not having her memories flayed open in front of the others. "It was him or me," she said shortly, looking at Steve with a warning in her eyes.

Steve nodded. "So we have an hour," he said, changing the topic. "Perhaps Colonel Sheppard would care to explain why we're really here?"

Bruce frowned, puzzled, but he was the only one who apparently wasn't expecting the question. John rubbed the back of his neck and went to sit in one of the chairs by the door, slouching a little. At his apparent casualness, Tony relaxed, and even Maria softened a bit from her extreme alertness.

Only Natasha knew it was an act, one her son had perfected over forty years, and her heart ached a little.

"The Goa'uld aren't the only aliens we've encountered," John said. "Just the first. But in all the regions of space we've been to, we've never experienced the Chitauri, not anything like them. Same thing with the Tesseract. Given all that we have seen across the universe over the past eighteen years, it's a little alarming that all this stuff suddenly pops up on our radar."

"So you wanted to compare notes?" Maria asked.

"Sort of," John said, smiling faintly. "But not specifically with you guys."

"Then who?" Tony asked, but Bruce had already moved ahead of him.

"You wanted to talk to Thor," Bruce said. He straightened his glasses. "He's not human, and the Tesseract is Asgardian in origin. You wanted him to come with us today."

"The invitation was extended to you all," John said cautiously. "But yes, we were hoping he'd be able to join you."

"Yeah, well, he got a better offer," Tony said. "Weekend in Canada with the girlfriend. Skiing, hot tubs, you know the drill."

"Maybe another time," John said, and there was that cautious tone of voice again, one that Natasha knew meant he was hiding something. But she wouldn't press, not right now in front of everyone. There was time later to find out why the people involved in the Stargate program were so interested in Thor.

"What about now?" Tony asked. "What's a pilot like you doing in a place like this?"

John smiled, for real this time. "I guess you all have clearance for this," he said. "Anyone heard of Atlantis?"

The name fell like an electric charge into the room. "The lost city of Atlantis, Atlantis?" Steve said. Bruce pulled off his glasses to stare at John. Tony gaped. "That's real?"

"It's real," John said, his smile bittersweet. "We found it in 2004."

"How?" Tony demanded. "Where is it?"

John pulled a small black device from his pocket and held it out on his palm. The device glowed briefly, then a three-dimensional star map filled the room. John pointed with his free hand. "This is us," he said, indicating the familiar Milky Way. He moved his finger a few inches in the hologram, pointing at another cluster of stars indicating a galaxy. "This is the Pegasus Galaxy. This is where we found Atlantis."

He waved his hand, and the hologram changed. A shimmering city appeared, buildings of alien design, floating on an alien sea.

Atlantis.

Natasha clenched her hands to contain her reaction. This was John's city, the mission he'd had for so many years. She'd been trying to learn more about John's project for years, and every time she thought she had something, the details were snatched away. She hadn't thought it possible to keep something like that from her, for so long, but now she _knew_ and it was too late for John; it had been taken away from him.

"Another... galaxy," Steve said. "Where you found the lost city of Atlantis."

"Yup," John said.

"Did you get there by Stargate, or do you have other methods of intergalactic travel?" Bruce asked, putting his glasses back on to examine the hologram.

"We got there by Stargate, originally," John said. "We have ships that can do intergalactic runs now."

"Ships," Steve repeated weakly.

" _Spaceships_?" Tony exclaimed. "How the hell did the U.S. Military build spaceships and not use any Stark tech?" Before John could answer, Tony's jaw dropped. "Oh god _please_ tell me you didn't use any Hammer tech!"

While the boys bickered about technology, Natasha exchanged a glance with Maria. This was above their pay grade, way above. If the U.S. military had singlehandedly created an interstellar program, there was no telling what sort of Earth-bound political power imbalance would result if the program came to light.

It would make the Cold War seem like a playground tussle in comparison.

Natasha steeled herself. "John?" she asked delicately, cutting into the verbal sparring match between her son and Tony Stark. "Your friend, Rodney McKay? Is he on the Atlantis project as well?"

"Yeah, he's still there," John said, too evenly. "Why?"

"He's Canadian," Natasha observed. She wasn't sure how to ask her question without starting an international incident, but John just blinked at her.

"Yeah, so?" Slowly, comprehension dawned. "The Atlantis project is under the supervision of an international oversight committee. It's not just General O'Neill and Homeworld Security running the show."

Natasha's tension eased slightly. "I'm sure Director Fury will be glad to hear that," she said to Maria.

"I'm not," Tony interjected. "They've got Hammer tech embedded on intergalactic star destroyers, how long do you think they have before everything just blows up? Stark Industries can retrofit them so they actually _work_ \-- "

"Because giving Iron Man access to alien technology is right at the top of everyone's to-do list?" John interrupted.

"Hey, of the people in this room, I'm the only one who's _flown into space_ so don't give me that bullshit," Tony snapped, all hints of joking gone from his voice.

"You think I'm joking?" John retorted. "Stargate Command didn't approach Stark Industries for tech development on this because there were people who didn't want to hand you the technology to take over the world, okay?"

"You thought I'd take over the world?" Tony asked. He'd gone pale, too pale, and Natasha had known him long enough to know what dangerous sign that was. "I'm sorry, do I look like a supervillian to you, Sheppard?"

"You used to sell weapons," John said evenly, never taking his eyes from Tony's. "And there was a time you weren't all that careful about who you sold them to."

Tony didn't move, didn't react, just stared back at John. Natasha could nearly taste the tension in the air, hovering on a knife's point. Before either one of them could speak, could push the tension over into disaster, Natasha leaned forward, putting her hands out, palms up.

"A lot's changed for Tony since 2004," she said, voice calm, quiet, soothing. "And it's Generals and committees who make the decisions on military contracts." Neither man moved, but a bit of the tension drained from the air. "John, can you show us more about what has been happening here for the past eighteen years? All your alien worlds?"

John let out a breath, before deliberately taking his eyes off Tony to look at Natasha. "Sure," he said. "I can read you in a bit on the Ancients, the aliens who built the Stargates and Atlantis. And the Ori, one of the more recent problems we've had to face. They were a real bitch."

From his careful phrasing, Natasha knew John was hiding something, keeping something up his sleeve. But she'd wait, and listen, and maybe be able to tease hidden meaning from John's words without him realizing.

She'd never thought that she'd be in the unenviable position of having to decipher her own son's secrets.

* * *

After the briefing was over, Natasha's head was aching from all the complications of Stargate travel and the intergalactic politics at play. Who would have thought that the Chitauri would have been one of the lesser threats faced by Earth?

And that didn't even begin to take into account the implications of the Stargate would have on Earth. The world was still coming to terms with the existence of aliens after the Chitauri invasion. When the population found out about more aliens, some peaceful and some not...

Natasha had been alive for very long time, and even she couldn't begin to imagine how the world would react.

Maria and Steve were talking with Dr. Jackson and John about next steps, while Bruce had Tony pinned in a corner and was visibly trying to talk him down from some sort of manic science experiment plan.

That left Natasha standing alone by the open glass bay windows, staring down into the large room that housed the Stargate.

The air moved, and without turning her head, Natasha knew who was at her side. "It's hard to think that something so beautiful could cause so much trouble," she said.

"Tell me about it," Jack replied. He rested his hands on the window's edge. "You didn't seem all that surprised about the Stargate. Were you in on any of the intel back in the early days?

Natasha shook her head. "After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, I turned my attention to more.... domestic matters."

"That's one way to put it," Jack said.

Natasha pursed her lips. He was baiting her about her past, but her head hurt to much for her to care. "What do you want, Jack?"

He tapped his fingers against the glass. "I was going to say that this whole thing has been unexpected, but really, I'm not surprised that you‘ve crossed paths with a Goa'uld before."

Natasha turned her head to look at him. "Why is that?"

"History," Jack told her. "You've got a habit of being in interesting places at interesting times."

Unwillingly, Natasha's mind threw her back to Belarus, crawling out of the burning compound into the freezing cold. She dug her fingers into her to keep her hands from shaking.

She was not going to lose control again, especially around Jack O'Neill.

"I'm lucky, I guess," Natasha finally said.

"Yeah, luck," Jack echoed. He leaned against the window to watch Natasha. "I've had that same kind of luck myself."

Across the room, John broke off talking with Steve and Maria, and headed over to where Bruce and Tony were huddled. Tony reached for John, hauling him in to look at something on the tablet computer. Their heads bent together, it was difficult for Natasha to reconcile their previous antagonism in the break-out room.

"What about John?" Natasha asked Jack.

"What about him?"

"You promoted him to full Colonel," Natasha reminded Jack. "What's going on there?"

Jack leveled a steady gaze at Natasha. "How much did Sheppard tell you about what happened to him?"

"That you pulled him off his posting and gave him a promotion at the same time," Natasha said. "Although he wasn't exactly forthcoming about being held by the enemy."

"Yeah," Jack said. "I guess he wouldn't be."

"Jack," Natasha said. "Tell me what happened to my son."

Jack glanced down at his hands. "Sheppard was captured and it took us a while to get him back."

Natasha's insides twisted up. "What did they do to him?"

"It wasn't exactly a botox treatment," Jack said. "He was in bad shape when his team finally found him."

Natasha tried to breathe around the rising bile in her throat. Her son had been taken, he had been _tortured,_ and Natasha hadn't even known he was missing.

"Some folks were saying he'd been compromised, being in enemy hands for so long," Jack went on, his voice nearly inaudible. "Which is complete bullshit, but a component of the International Oversight Committee used that as an excuse to push Sheppard out of Atlantis. They'd been trying for years, basically since we started the Atlantis project, but this time we couldn't stop them."

"You could have tried harder--"

"Not this time," Jack interrupted her. "Before, Sheppard was field-ready whenever anything came down, and he could always prove himself when it mattered." Jack stared down at the Stargate. "The situation's different this time."

 _This time_ , echoed in Natasha's head.

Over the years, she herself had been injured many times in the line of duty; she knew how long it could take to resume top fighting form, depending on the severity of the injury. She'd been beaten, shot, starved, whipped, stabbed. But no matter how long it took, she always pulled herself together and went back for more.

But this was different. This was John.

"Hey," Jack said. "He's going to be all right."

Natasha swallowed hard, pushing away the panic attack trembling on the edges of her vision. "You know this how?"

"'Cause that's the way he is," Jack pointed out. "You know that as well as I do. He just needs something to focus on in the meantime."

"Is that why you promoted him?"

Jack frowned. "No, that paperwork went through a few months before we got him back."

"What about his special projects?" Natasha asked. "What do you have him doing?"

"Call it a hunch," Jack said after a minute. "I've got this feeling that something's coming at us, something bigger than we've seen in a while, and we're going to need everyone on deck when it hits."

"Is that why you pulled the Avengers in on the Stargate project now?" Natasha asked, finally turning away from the Stargate. Her team was scattered throughout the room, and with a sudden ache, Natasha wished Coulson had been there instead of Maria. He was so much better at the big picture stuff than any of them.

"All hands on deck," Jack said again.

The door to the room opened, and Colonel Samantha Carter entered. The woman scanned the group, eyes passing Jack, and a brief smile crossed the woman's face before she moved over to Dr. Jackson's side.

Ah, so it was like that, then. Natasha smiled up at Jack. "You and your blondes," she murmured, sliding away as Jack glared at her.

Just like old times.

Natasha moved on quiet feet to where Tony, Bruce and John were in the middle of a discussion. "Are ladies allowed in this little club?" Natasha asked, edging in between John and Tony.

"Ew, no, cooties," Tony said distractedly.

"Anytime," John retorted, moving over to let Natasha see what they were working on. "Mr. Stark was just expressing his displeasure with some of the more venerable equipment in the Gateroom."

"I'd be able to help if you guys actually let me see the Stargate activate," Tony said. "Come on. You don't just bring a guy down here and get him hot and bothered about interstellar wormhole physics and leave him hanging."

"Do you have any idea how much power it takes to open a stable wormhole?" John asked.

"How much?" Tony's hand was poised over the tablet, gaze steady and bright on John's face. It was his _Science!_ expression, and Natasha had never been so thankful for Tony's rapid mood swings when it came to learning about new things.

"No idea, that's Carter's thing," John said.

Tony's eyes narrowed. "Tease."

Suddenly, a claxon sounded and warning lights began to whirl in the Gateroom below. "Off world activation," came a voice over the loudspeaker, echoing throughout the complex. "General Landry to the Control Room."

"Looks like you get to see some action after all," John said.

"Even with the Stargate to stabilize the wormhole, it must take an immense amount of power to keep the wormhole active," Bruce said, pulling off his glasses as the Stargate's chevrons began to glow.

"The dampener coils are pretty outdated to keep the place from shaking apart," Tony said, pointing down into the room. "Original install from the nineties?"

"Probably," John said with a shrug. "I wasn't around then."

Without any further warning, the air in the center of the Stargate exploded in a whirl of quicksilver and light, blossoming out to fill the entire circle before flattening into a shimmer of light.

"Oh," Tony said, his voice free of sarcasm. Natasha understood; she'd heard about the Stargate during the day, but to actually see it, to realize what it meant as a gateway to other worlds, other civilizations, to places that offered home and dreams instead of just nightmares....

It took her breath away.

"Closing the iris," came the disembodied voice, as a lens of metal swirled shut over the Stargate's surface.

"Keeps out the riff-raff," John said. "You know. Bothersome aliens and gate-to-gate salesmen." He leaned against Natasha's side. "Pretty cool, huh?"

"It is," Natasha said. This was what her son had been doing for so many years - going out into the galaxy, encountering friends and enemies. There was so much beyond the small planet of Earth, and John had _lived_ it.

Then, the metal iris swirled open, and people walked out of the wormhole's shimmering surface. Walked, as if it was normal to travel across the galaxy through a wormhole.

Tony turned to Bruce. "I want one."

"Tony..."

"We can make one in the spare R&D lab. Come on, it'll be fun!"

Natasha slipped her hand around John's arm, giving him a squeeze as the wormhole dissipated into nothingness. "This is what you do?" she asked quietly.

John let out a breath. "Used to do," he told her, and she could hear the pain in his voice. "Not anymore."

"I'm sorry," Natasha said, and almost meant it.

After all, it had been a wormhole like this one that had taken her son to the hands of the enemy.

tbc


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this section, we reference past trauma and abuse, as well reference to a past relationship between two of the characters. Since it's "past" I'm not putting it in tags.

_A few days later, back in New York_

"So let me get this straight."

Natasha ducked the blow, slipping around Clint, her hands held up in a defensive position. "What?"

They circled each other on the mat, each trying to find the right angle of attack. "I spend a few days in Chicago, stalking some useless drug lord for shits and giggles, and the bunch of you get to hear about aliens on Earth in the middle of Colorado?"

"Pretty much, yeah." Natasha spotted an opening and darted in, fist striking Clint's ribs with enough force to make him stagger back. He retaliated by ducking low, kicking her feet out from under her and pinning her bodily on the mat.

"That's cool," he said, a grin on his face and his breath hot on her cheek.

She didn't answer, instead arching her back and flipping them around so she was on top. She kneed him in the side and bounced to her feet before he could grab her again. "It was interesting, yes."

Clint got up, favoring his side, but he still had a smile on his face. "I bet that totally pissed Stark off."

"What, that the Air Force knew about aliens, or that they didn't ask Stark Industries to build their spaceships?"

Clint shrugged and made his move. He was a fraction of a second too slow, however, and Natasha caught his wrist and let his momentum carry them around, around, to the ground.

"That makes six for me," Natasha said, breathing heavily at the workout. "You're off your game, Barton."

"All that fancy living in Chicago, ma'am," Clint sassed back. He struggled, but Natasha had him pinned. "How the hell can you even keep me down, I outweigh you by like forty pounds."

"Forty?" Natasha demanded, releasing Clint's wrists and straddling his waist. "Careful how you speak to a lady."

"I'll let you know if I find one," Clint said. He let his head fall to the mat. "Seriously, Nat, what the hell? More aliens?"

"If you acknowledge two alien races, why not more?" Natasha asked. She got to her feet and held out a hand for Clint. He took it and stood.

"And John's been dealing with them for years?"

"Since 2004," Natasha said. "No wonder he couldn't tell me what he was doing while on deployment."

"Damn." Clint went over to the bench to retrieve his water bottle. "That is so many kinds of unfair. Think of all the little green men jokes I could have been making all these years."

Natasha smiled at Clint. They were no longer lovers, hadn't been since before he was assigned to the Tesseract project, but at times such as these, when they sparred, Natasha could spare a few fond thoughts toward him. She'd always been impressed by his physicality.

"Steve will tell you the whole story this afternoon when Thor gets back," Natasha said. "I'm going to shower."

"Have fun," Clint said. "I'm going do a bit of time on the treadmill."

"You hate the treadmill."

"Better than being forced to run with Steve. The man would leave a cheetah in the dust."

"You and your ego."

"In a room full of superheroes, my ego is all I got."

He blew Natasha a kiss and moved deeper into the exercise room. Shaking her head, Natasha left, heading down the corridor to the elevator, and then up to her private floor in Stark Tower, accessibly only by her bioscan.

Tony had made space in his home for all of the Avengers, even her with their history. Not for the first time, Natasha wondered if she would ever be able to figure out what made Tony tick.

"Good afternoon, Jarvis," Natasha called out in the living room. She and the AI had an agreement – in her rooms, when everything was normal, he only spoke to her when called upon. In return, in the event of an emergency, Jarvis would call for her, in which case she would drop everything and respond.

"Good afternoon, ma'am."

At least she had gotten him to stop calling her 'Agent'. "Do you know if there have been any changes to Thor's planned arrival time?"

"Not that I am aware of," Jarvis said. "He should arrive back in New York before dinner."

That was good; the Avengers could fill their wayward team members in on all the details of the Stargate and aliens and intergalactic travels. Not that any of this should surprise Thor too much; but maybe he knew about the Stargates, had information on what was really happening out there in the universe.

"Thank you, Jarvis," Natasha said, and that was the signal that their conversation was over.

Natasha was not totally sure what she thought of Jarvis. True, like Steve, she came from a time before computers existed; she could be excused a bit of uneasiness about an artificial intelligence, but at the same time, she'd spent so long in Department X, being trained in the Red Room...

Being remade, being _rewritten_.

So sometimes, when Clint teased her about being freaked out by Jarvis, she just glared and let him think that the concept of a someone being created at the hands of a man was too foreign for her to accept.

She would never, _could_ never, let anyone know how much she understood.

She was being maudlin. Stepping across the darkened room, her senses open in case of intruders or attack (there never was, not in this safest of spaces, but Natasha had not survived for so long by assuming anything was safe), she stripped off her exercise clothes as she went.

Natasha looked at herself in the bathroom mirror, grimacing at the darkening bruise on her ribs. Clint had put more force behind one of his blows than she had thought.

He wasn't the only one off his game today.

With a sigh, Natasha stepped into the shower and turned on the water. They had been in New York for days and all that time, Natasha hadn't been able to shake the memory of the bone-deep cold of a Belarus winter.

In spite of the hot water, Natasha started to shiver again, and her body's reaction only made her angry. It was a physiological response to past memories. Steve would call it shell-shock, Tony would label it PTSD, but at the end of the day it meant one thing, and one thing only.

No matter all that she had done, all that she could do, that wasn't good enough. In spite of her training, the experimentation, what the Red Room had _made her_... some days, it wasn't enough.

Some days, Natasha was weak.

Her hand was already reaching to turn up the water temperature; her body telling her it needed more heat, but the tiny logical voice in her head told her to resist her body's imagined frailties, that turning the water to scalding would only cause injury, not relief.

Instead, Natasha put her hands on the tile wall and let the water wash over her, carry away her sweat and impurities, down the drain, away.

Slowly, her shaking subsided. Her breathing returned to normal, her heart rate slowed, her muscles relaxed. It was just shell-shock, she reminded herself. The memory of the compound in Belarus, and what had happened there, had been triggered by the touch of the naquada under Cheyenne Mountain a few days before.

As Natasha reached for the soap, she made herself think beyond the beating, beyond trying to kill Seth, beyond crawling out of the burning compound into the snow.

A ghost had walked out of the blizzard to save her.

He wasn't her back-up on that particular mission. He had later told her that no one believed Seth was a real threat, so he'd broken protocol and gone after her on his own.

A tall man, a strong man, he'd picked her up and balanced her weight on his metal arm, carried her to a stolen automobile, drove her to a back-water hospital and held her hand while they'd had to fix her injuries without enough anesthetic.

For saving her life, they'd punished him.

And he never blamed her.

A very different grief washed over Natasha at the memory of that man. It had been over thirteen years since she had last seen him, her first (and for a long time, her only) friend. And she never would again.

She didn't cry. The past was in the past, and memories were not worth the tears.

Natasha was just reaching for the shampoo when Jarvis' voice suddenly filled the bathroom, loud enough to be heard over the water. "Agent Romanoff, your presence would not go amiss in the penthouse."

Natasha turned off the water and was out of the shower in a flash. "Threat level?" she demanded. If need be, she could be in the penthouse in under thirty seconds; however, it would take no time at all to see if she could dress and arm herself first.

Jarvis paused for a fraction of a second, then he said, in a voice that sounded oddly abashed for an AI, "It is perhaps less urgent than I originally assumed, Agent Romanoff. If you were to make an appearance in approximately three minutes, I believe the situation will not have escalated beyond repair."

"Explain," Natasha ordered as she raced across her bedroom, toweling her skin dry as she went.

"Colonel Sheppard has arrived, ma'am, and is speaking with Mr. Stark."

Natasha looked at the ceiling, perplexed. "Colonel _John_ Sheppard?"

"Yes, ma'am," Jarvis confirmed. "He has just arrived. If past experiences are to be measured, I expect he and Mr. Stark will be able to avoid a confrontation for approximately three minutes of conversation, before the levels of antagonism reach a tipping point."

Natasha swore under her breath. "Why is John here?" she asked as she pulled on a bra.

A pause, then, "He just told Mr. Stark that he wishes to continue the conversation he had with you, regarding aliens in the Milky Way galaxy." Another pause. "And that there was information that was not shared with you at that time."

"How's Tony taking that?" Natasha asked. She opted for speed in dressing rather than fashion, grabbing the nearest clothes she could lay hands on, but still took the time to slip a knife into the waistband of her jeans. Not that she anticipated using it on either Tony or John, but she felt better knowing she was armed. Just in case.

"Mr. Stark says he expected nothing less," Jarvis reported. "That such behavior is Colonel Sheppard's modus operandi." Another pause. "Perhaps three minutes was an overly generous estimate, Agent Romanoff."

Natasha pulled a shirt over her head, flipped her wet hair out of the collar, and took off at a run.

"You are such a fucking hypocrite!" Tony was shouting, so loudly that Natasha could hear his voice down the stairwell. "You say _I'm_ the one who caused all that?"

"If the arms-dealer shoe fits," John retorted. Natasha rounded the bend in the stairwell and took the remaining flight two stairs at a time.

"I was never the one with my finger on the button, was I?" Natasha came out of the stairwell to see Tony and John facing off in the middle of the penthouse. Tony had his hands flat at his sides; in another person, the gesture would have been non-threatening, but Tony wasn't a normal person, he was Iron Man, and hands flat was how Iron Man attacked.

"You built the button, don't pretend that makes you innocent," John said.

"Tell me something, Sheppard," Tony demanded, stepping into John's personal space. "If I build the weapons and that makes me the Merchant of Death, what the fuck does that make you?"

"Just Death," John shot back, and before anything could happen (Tony's hands flat at his sides, John inches taller and trained in weaponless fighting techniques) Natasha crossed the room on bare feet.

"Boys," she said, her voice pleasant and light. She laid one hand on Tony's forearm and her other on John's chest, stepping in to push them apart. "John, I'm glad you're here."

After a long moment, John broke eye contact with Tony and met Natasha's gaze. "Tony and I were just catching up," he said.

Tony took a few steps back, putting space between him and John before he turned around. "Yeah, just like old times," he muttered.

Natasha slipped her arm through John's and leaned against his side. She could feel the tension in his body from the fight, and she wondered, not for the first time, what exactly had happened between John and Tony for them to treat each other as they did.

"Would you like some tea?" Natasha asked John.

"No, he doesn't," Tony said from behind the bar where he was pouring himself a drink. John narrowed his eyes at Tony, who gave him a fake smile. "We don't have any tea."

"Coffee, then?" Natasha gave John's arm a warning squeeze before going to join Tony behind the bar. "I know we have coffee."

"We've got coffee." Tony leaned against the bar, drink untouched by his hand. He watched Natasha pull the coffee canister out from behind a collection of bottles. "Did Jarvis call you?" he asked in an undertone.

"No idea what you're talking about," Natasha replied, pouring a carafe of water into the machine. "John, come over here," she said, raising her voice. "We can socialize like civilized human beings."

Tony made a derisive sound, but he didn't move as John joined them at the bar, laying a small briefcase on the marble countertop as he did so. "What's in there?" Tony asked.

"Something you've never seen," John said, making it sound like an insult.

"You'd be surprised what I've seen," Tony shot back.

"Fine," John said, and popped the lid on the case. Inside were three devices, of obviously alien design.

The first was the largest, a collection of gold metal pieces and connecting cords with a gleaming red gem set in the center. When Natasha reached for it, John stilled her hand.

"That's Goa'uld tech," he said in warning. "It's got naquada in it."

Natasha looked down at the metal. "Is it dangerous?" she asked, touching the center gem. The sensation of the metal on her skin sent a shiver down her spine, making her stomach churn. But now she knew what the sensation was, and could push both the physical reaction and the memories behind the walls in her mind.

"Only if you're a Goa'uld," John said. He let go of her hand. "It's a _kara kesh_. We usually just call it a hand device."

He helped Natasha untangle the cords and set the device the right way for her to slide her hand through the wrist brace and into the finger pieces. The red gem lay in the center of her palm as she held up her hand for Tony to see, an echo of the Iron Man gauntlet.

"Patent infringement," Tony grumbled. "It's derivative and unimaginative."

"Iron Man's version is still better," Natasha told him, sliding the metal off her hand and laying it back inside the briefcase. "I doubt you can use this to fly."

The second object in the case was a hand-sized unadorned milky white stone. At first Natasha thought it truly was a stone, but as John's hand passed over it, it glowed with muted greens and reds under the surface.

The third item, which John pulled from the case, looked the most familiar. About the size of a Stark mini-tablet, the screen lit up when John touched it, blinking with characters that Natasha didn't recognize.

John held up the tablet. "Ancient technology," he said. "The Ancients were the builders of the Stargates, and Atlantis, like I said back in Colorado."

"And they built you a gameboy," Tony deadpanned. "How cute. Does it have GPS?"

"No, but it doubles as life-signs detector." The letters on the screen changed, showing a three-dimensional outlay of the top floors of Stark Tower. Tiny blinking lights moved about the screen. John pointed at a cluster of blinking lights at the top of the screen. "That's us."

Natasha leaned in to see the screen more clearly. Three blinking lights in the penthouse, two stationary on two separate floors below, where Natasha knew Clint and Bruce were exercising and working, respectively. One light was moving quickly up in a straight line.

"Jarvis, who's in the elevator?" Tony asked, all animosity gone from his voice.

"Captain Rogers has returned from his run, sir," Jarvis said.

"Are you monitoring any spike in anything? Can you tell we're being scanned?"

"I cannot."

"How the hell does this work?" Tony asked. He took the device from John's hand, and it immediately went black.

"Not sure of the details," John said.

"It needs new batteries." Tony banged the device against the bar's marble top. "You leave your charger at home?"

"It's ATA technology," John said, taking the device back from Tony. "If you've got the Ancient gene, you can activate the tech. It's basically a built-in safe-guard that an alien enemy can't hotwire your car or blow up your city."

Natasha frowned at the device, fully functional again in John's hand. "Why is it working for you?"

John handed the device to Natasha. As soon as it left John's hand, it went dead again. "Like I said the other day, some Ancients left the Pegasus Galaxy and headed back to Earth. Guess they interbred with the local population and the genes trickled down after all these years. I'm a natural carrier, that's what the doctors say."

"Not through Mommy Dearest, it looks like," Tony said. He pulled two mugs from underneath the counter and poured coffee into them. "Looks like you got something of value from your father after all."

The look John gave Tony was distinctly unfriendly, but he didn't reply to the jab.

Natasha handed John back the device, unease pooling in her stomach. "Does the gene mean anything else?"

"Not so far as anyone can tell," John said. He put the device back in the briefcase and closed the lid. "It's just a thing. Don't worry about it."

"Yeah, he's like forty now," Tony pointed out. "If he was going to grow another head or start exhibiting supervillain behavior, he'd have done it by now."

"Supervillain behavior?" John echoed.

"Hey, you're the one with the alien gene that let you use alien technology. That's one hell of a cheat code in the supervillain sweepstakes."

John sighed, accepting the cup of coffee that Tony put in front of him. "Inclinations aside, I don't have the time to be a bad guy, Stark. I work for a living."

"Sounds dreary," Tony said, dismissing John's protestation with the wave of a hand. "What am I drinking, this is horrible."

"You're welcome," Natasha said, but Tony was already moving, dumping the remains of his mug into the sink and pouring himself another cup, this time adding three spoonfuls of sugar.

"Come on," John said. He picked up the case and led Natasha across the penthouse floor to the seating area. "Are you doing better?"

"I am," Natasha lied with a smile. She'd been having flashbacks for days and kept waking up with her heart in her throat, but she would never admit her weaknesses to anyone.

She was Natalia Alianovna Romanova, the Black Widow. She was over seventy years old, had been a killer of men since she was twelve years old. She might not be strong enough to keep from reliving her past, but she could to hide that past in a place no one would ever be able to see.

Especially her son.

"Don't worry about me, John," she added, putting her hand on his arm in reassurance. "Really."

John rubbed the back of his neck absently. "Yeah, we're all just fine here," he muttered.

Natasha looked him over. Dressed in civilian clothes, he seemed frailer than he had in uniform, and younger than she'd thought possible. No longer were there lines in the corners of his eyes; the grey was gone from his hair. He appeared younger than he had on that fateful day in 2002, when Coulson had thrown John into the interrogation room with her after she had turned herself in to SHIELD.

Now, ten years later, the only signs that any time had passed for John was in his eyes, holding the weight of the years he'd seen.

Natasha knew very well what that was like. On some days, she looked in the mirror to find a young girl with ancient eyes staring back at her.

"Tell me something," Natasha asked, suddenly needing to hear John's voice.

"Like what?"

"Anything."

"Huh. Well, Torren's talking, finally," he began. "Just a few words, but it's a start. Rodney keeps saying the kid's been studying at the Ronon Dex School of Elocution."

"How is Teyla?"

"Great. She's a fast healer. Even two bullets to the chest didn't do much to slow her down. She's still on Atlantis." John looked down at his hands. "So that's a thing."

"Are you worried about your people?" Natasha asked.

"Not really," John said. Natasha could hear the bluff in his voice. "I was the only one that got kicked to the curb. The city's still got McKay and the science teams, and Teyla and Ronon to help navigate the galaxy."

"What about the military component?"

John smiled, and there was a hint of real warmth in his expression. "They bumped up my 2IC to Lieutenant Colonel while I was... well, indisposed. Lorne's the best guy for the job. He's been around the galaxy a bit, knows the lay of the land."

"Good."

Across the room, Tony cursed as he emptied another pot of coffee down the sink.

Natasha wanted to ask John what had happened, why he looked so _young_ , what the enemy had done to him. But as secure as Stark Tower was, it was still Tony's home, and Jarvis was everywhere. Natasha would not ask her son to tell his secrets in front of Tony's creation.

Voices drifted up the staircase, and in a few moments, Clint and Bruce came into the penthouse. Clint broke off what he was saying to Bruce when he saw John sitting beside Natasha. "Hey, Sheppard, good to see you again."

"Barton," John replied, standing up to shake Clint's hand. "How are things?"

Clint shrugged. "Can't complain. Hear you got promoted, congrats on that."

"Thanks."

Bruce gave John a nod in greeting, which the man returned. "What's Tony doing?" Bruce asked, glancing at the corner of the penthouse.

"Making coffee," Natasha said. "Again."

"Because something is wrong," Tony yelled from behind the bar. "This isn't even chemistry, Jesus Christ, it's fucking _applied physics_ , any monkey could do it."

"Ten bucks says Thor electrocuted the coffee maker and forgot to tell Tony before he left for Canada," Clint said in an undertone.

"Sucker's bet," Bruce replied. "Colonel Sheppard, are you here for a social visit?"

"Not exactly," John said. "There's some other stuff we need to talk about that we didn't get around to in Colorado."

"More alien stuff, totally called that one!" Tony shouted. He gave the coffee machine one last smack before heading across the penthouse floor. "Which is not a new concept, you know."

"Like, more alien stuff as in numbers, or as in kinds?" Clint asked.

"Both," Tony said before John could speak. "What? Tell me I'm wrong."

Natasha sighed. "Am I going to have to give you boys a time-out?" she asked.

At her words, some of the growing tension left John's shoulders, and he gave her a half-hearted smile. "Aw, Mom...."

The elevator door opened, disgorging Steve Rogers into the penthouse. His hair was still wet from his post-run shower, but he was dressed impeccably. Natasha was reminded that she likely looked a mess, in a pair of faded jeans and a loose t-shirt, wet hair hanging over her shoulders.

She considered, then discarded, the idea of excusing herself to change. Her clothes were perfectly presentable, and her casual appearance had set John at ease.

"Colonel," Steve said in greeting. "Good to see you again, so soon."

"Captain," John replied.

"Doctor," Tony said, turning to Bruce for a moment before glancing at Clint and Natasha. "Agent, Agent." He gave John a wide smile. "Colonel."

"Stop razzing, Tony," Steve warned.

"Yes, do stop razzing Tony," Tony said. The lights in the room flickered, and the distant sound of thunder rolled through the room. "And here comes our resident god of thunder. Jarvis!"

"Initiating power protocol number 43," Jarvis said. The lights in the room dimmed, and the flickering stopped. "Levels are holding steady."

"Tony, what are you doing?" Steve asked.

"Thor's accidental lightning when he lands after a long-distance flight keeps frying the secondary switches, and that drains the arc reactor powering this building," Tony explained, pulling up a holographic read-out. "I'm playing with manipulating the power levels when he comes in so the levels stay steady."

"Why don't you just ask him to stop electrocuting the building?" Clint asked.

The look Tony threw in Clint's direction was pitying. "Where's the fun in that?"

As the thunder grew closer, John slipped across the floor to Tony's side. "What's that?" he asked, pointing at a fluctuating reading.

"That's—" Tony stopped suddenly. "Unless..."

"This?" John poked the screen. Tony batted his hand away and flicked a few holographic switches. The lights grew brighter, and remained steady.

"Huh."

"Power levels are stable," Jarvis said, just as the thunder and lightning crashed in unison, and Thor landed on the helipad on the penthouse level.

Tony turned to glare at John. "What was that?"

John shrugged, putting his hands in his pockets. "You're up in a plane, you get hit by lightning frequently," he said. "Same thing here."

"Except in the way that it's not," Tony shot back.

At this point, Thor strode into the penthouse, soaking wet. "Friends!" he exclaimed, holding his arms wide in greeting.

"Good weekend with Jane?" Clint asked, hopping up on the low divider wall.

"Indeed," Thor agreed. He shifted Mjolnir to his left hand as he came over to where John stood with Tony. "We have not met," he said to John.

Natasha stepped forward, putting herself at John's side. There had to be some kind of Asgardian protocol on introducing family members, but since their only experience with Thor's family had been Loki, the topic area was generally avoided.

"Thor, I would like to introduce you to my son, John Sheppard," Natasha said.

Thor slowed for a moment, then a bright smile spread across his face. "John Sheppard, Son of Natasha, I greet you," he said formally, holding out his hand.

John smiled back, his expression more open than Natasha had seen in many months. "And I greet you, Thor Odinson." They shook hands. "Did you get caught in the storm over great lakes?" John asked.

"I did," Thor said. "It was to be expected in this season." He gave John an considering look. "Do you fly?"

"A bit," John said modestly. "But, planes and helicopters, not..." He made a hand gesture at Tony. "On my own or anything."

"Jealous?" Tony asked.

"Not so much," John retorted.

Natasha sighed. "How's Jane?" she asked Thor, not wanting to listen to John and Tony get into another argument.

"Jane is well," Thor said. He shook his head, rain drops from his hair landing on every nearby surface. "I did not know of your son."

There was that considering look again. It was so easy to think of Thor as a boisterous frat boy, sometimes people forgot he was a near immortal warrior. Natasha gathered her thoughts, to figure out what Thor really wanted to know. "On this world, someone like me shouldn't have a child," she said quietly. "Not one as old as John. It would draw unwarranted attention."

Thor nodded, seeming to accept this explanation. "I have long suspected that you are more than you appear, Lady Natasha."

"That's putting it mildly," Clint muttered from the side of the room.

"Great!" Tony said, clapping his hands together. "Thor's home, so can we _please_ get to the part of the evening where Sheppard tells us all about what the U.S. military knows about the other aliens on earth?"

"Other aliens?" Thor repeated, frowning.

"Yeah," Tony said. He flicked open a holographic display, and tapping a few times, brought up a near-perfect rendering of the Stargate, nearly as tall as the penthouse ceiling. "Ever see one of these?"

Thor set Mjolnir on the ground before stepping closer to the display. "What is this you bring?" he demanded. "This is a Gate of the Alterans. It allows travel across the stars, in much the same way as the Bifrost. How does it come to be here?"

"You know about the Alterans?" John asked.

"They were once known to the Asgard, before they fell deep into civil war," Thor said. "How are they known to you?"

John shrugged, easing his shoulders into a casual pose, and it suddenly struck Natasha that this wasn't just her son in a room with her teammates; this was the warriors of two worlds facing each other down. "The Alterans came to this galaxy and built a whole hell of a lot of Stargates before hopping to the Pegasus Galaxy and doing it all over again," John said. "Only they were calling themselves the Ancients by that time."

"Where are they now?" Natasha asked, unable to stop herself from interjecting. "You didn't say when we were in Colorado."

"They either died off fighting a war with the Wraith in Pegasus, or they ascended," John said. "Either way, they're no longer my problem."

"Ascended?" Steve asked Bruce in an aside. Bruce shook his head.

"Ascended, like, evolve into a being of pure energy and infinite knowledge, which is basically like having every cheat code in the book," John said. "They've got some sort of non-interference prime directive, they're not the problem here." He focused his attention on Thor. "The whole reason I came here today is because, well, we've got a case of double identity."

"Finally, he spits it out," Tony muttered. John and Thor ignored him.

"I do not understand you," Thor said. "Where is the double identity?"

"Well," John said, "You claim that your people are the Asgard—"

"It is no mere claim!" Thor interrupted heatedly.

"—But we also know the Asgard," John went on, talking over Thor. "And you're not them."

That stunned Tor into momentary silence.

"We should have brought some popcorn," Clint whispered to Natasha. She jabbed him in the ribs.

"Who are these, claiming to be of Asgard?" Thor demanded. "By what right do they call themselves thus?"

John opened the small briefcase at his feet and pulled out the white milky stone. He straightened up and tossed the stone across the room to Thor, who caught it mid-air. "You know what that is?" John asked.

Thor turned the stone over in his hand, consternation clear on his face. "This is of Asgardian design," he said. "And yet it is different than any I have seen. Where did you get it?"

"The Asgard we knew used it as a control interface on their ships," John said as he nudged the briefcase aside with his foot. He glanced over his shoulder at Tony. "Can Jarvis access something remotely?"

"Yeah," Tony said. The man was standing behind Sheppard, his arms crossed over his chest, watching the discussion with an uncharacteristic silence.

John pulled a phone out of his pocket and tapped at it. "The thing is," he said, again speaking to Thor, "Our Asgard don't look anything like you. At least, not anymore."

Another holographic interface popped up, overlying the Stargate display. John tapped a folder, and up sprang a myriad of images.

Front and center, was a grey alien with an enlarged head and elongated black-on-black eyes.

"Okay, no!" Clint exclaimed. He jumped off the dividing wall. "This has got to be a joke!"

"Clint—" Natasha tried, but the man brushed her off.

"You're telling us that the little green men are real? This whole Are 51 crap is real?"

"Area 51 has never been used to hold Asgardians," John said with a bland expression.

"For fuck's sake—"

"Clint!" Natasha snapped, drawing everyone's attention. "Would you let him explain?"

Thor frowned at the display. "I have never seen beings such as these," he said to John. "Why would they claim to be of Asgard?"

"It's actually a little more complicated than that," John said reluctantly. "They started out looking like, well, you." He pulled up another image, of a tall muscular man. "Then they started cloning themselves and transferring their consciousness into the next clone when they were about to die."

"That's quite a genetic transition," Bruce said, pushing his glasses up his nose. He tapped at the display, pulling up more images of the Asgard. "How long have they been cloning?"

"Like, thirty thousand years?" John hedged. "Not quite sure."

"Why the degradation?" Tony asked. "Were they working off the source material?"

"Doubtful," Bruce muttered. "If they were replicating from the original genetic material, there wouldn't have been any evolutionary change over the millennia."

"But why would they even cloning start in the first place?" Tony asked. "Buddy over there," he pointed at the hologram of the tall man, "Doesn't look like he needs a little blue pill to get it up for the missus, if we're talking about reproduction."

"We don't know why the Asgard started cloning themselves," John said. "Just that they did." He turned back to Thor. "And is the weird part," he went on, ignoring Clint's muttered swearing. "This guy?" He pointed to the little grey alien hologram. "This is Thor."

"Huh?" Tony frowned at John. "Did you just stutter?"

"This is the Asgard who we knew as Thor," John went on. "He, well, he was a really good friend to the people of this planet. And a lot of other planets in this galaxy."

Thor wrapped his hand around the white stone and stood looking at the hologram-Thor. A look of regret passed over his face. "I believe I understand," he said after a minute.

"Can you spell it out for the rest of us?" Clint asked. "Because I'm missing most of the plot on this."

Thor handed the white stone to John. "It was a very long time ago. It was the end of days," he said, speaking to the room while looking at the hologram. "Ragnarök. The end of everything. It was to be the twilight of the gods, the end of us all, and from the final battle would the world be reborn."

Natasha wrapped her arms around herself, chilled at the bleak cold in Thor's words.

"We knew the time was drawing near, and Odin Allfather decreed that if this was to be our end, all Asgard should leave an echo of themselves on Yggdrasil, the tree of life." Thor smiled to himself. It was not a pleasant smile. "So stories of our greatness would dance forever amongst the stars."

"What does an 'echo' of yourself mean?" Bruce asked.

"I'm going to go with a genetic copy with a full personality back-up," Tony said. "You die, just wake up the copy and keep going."

"What happened at Ragnarök?" Steve asked.

Thor walked over to the window and stared down at the city below them. The buildings still bore marks of the Chitauri battle, scars across the landscape. "It was indeed a great battle, and many of my brethren died," he said. "However, the losses were not as great as foretold."

"So you didn't have to go out and wake up the clones of the dead?" Tony asked. "I guess it would be kind of complicated, having two Thors running around."

"What happened to them?" Steve asked. "After the battle?"

"I do not know," Thor admitted. "It was not a time for such questions; my brother Baldr and my nephews died in the battle. At the time, there was much grief and the necessity to rebuild Valhalla. I never thought to ask."

Natasha looked at the hologram- Thor, his large eyes seeming to stare back at her. "What if they woke up?" she asked, her stomach cramping with a lifetime of waking up on a cold metal table in the Red Room, memories not her own spilling from her head. "Would they have known they weren't real, that they were just copies?"

Even now, Natasha had no way of knowing which memories of those years were her own, and which had been forced into her by men with their blades and their drugs.

"The clones we've met never do," John said, drawing Natasha back.

"Meet a lot of clones in your line of work?" Tony asked.

"A few," John said, giving Tony a cold smile. "And no, you don't get to meet them."

"I have a question," Steve said, forestalling what might have been yet another spat between John and Tony. "Why does Colonel Sheppard keep speaking of these Asgard in the past tense?"

Thor turned from the window, as John let out a sigh. "The cloning process could only hold up for so long," John said, an apology in his voice. "The Asgard knew they were dying, really dying, and they couldn't let their technology fall into the hands of the younger races, that would have made your Ragnarök look like a playground spat. They decided to end things on their terms."

"Suicide?" Bruce asked, but it wasn't a question.

John nodded. "They destroyed all of their technology, one final bang. But they gave us some of their technology and research. From what I hear, they seemed to think that the human race had the potential to do good things."

The room fell silent at John's words. After a minute, Thor stepped forward, and offered his hand once again to John. "I thank you for your tale," Thor said. "I only wish I might have met these other Asgard, and known them for what they had become."

"You should talk to General O'Neill," John said. "He was the first human who Thor got to know from Earth. Thor counted the general as a friend."

"I will do so," Thor promised, letting go of John's hand.

"So," Clint said, breaking into the mood in the room, "If there was an alternate Thor out there, there were other Asgard as well?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"You ever meet another Loki?"

Thor's eyes narrowed at the mention of his brother, but John was looking at Clint and didn't see the reaction. "Yeah, about that."

"What was he like?"

"You know those stories of alien abduction and probing and stuff?"

Clint stared at John. "You're fucking _kidding_ me."

John crinkled his nose. "Not really. You might want to talk to General O'Neill about that one, too."

"Jesus," Clint muttered, turning on his heel and going over to the bar.

Thor moved to Natasha's side. "You must be proud of your son, being part of things much bigger than himself," he said to her.

Natasha permitted herself a small smile. "I am."

Thor laid a hand on Natasha's shoulder, then waved John over to the seating area. "Come, Sheppard, you must tell me more of the fate of the Alterans," he said. "What became of their civil war?"

Bruce and Steve exchanged a glance, then both went over to join Thor. That left Tony and Natasha in the middle of the penthouse floor.

"What?" Tony said when he caught Natasha staring at him.

"What's going on between you and John?" she asked.

Tony started to speak, caught himself on the first word, and gave her an insincere smile instead. "Not a damn thing," he said.

"You're a bad liar," Natasha told him.

"Yeah, well, maybe I'll get Sheppard to give me a few lessons." Tony stepped around her and headed towards the seats, hopping down next to Bruce and pulling up a holo display while he listened to Thor and John talk.

Natasha crossed her arms over her chest and wondered what Tony meant.

* * *

Hours later, Natasha and John walked arm in arm down Fifth Avenue.

"That went a whole lot better than I expected," John said as they waited for a street light to change.

"What were you anticipating?" Natasha asked.

"More pushback from your Thor about my Thor, for starters," John said. "Barton's reaction about the Asgard was more in line with what I expected."

Natasha hummed in agreement, stepping off the curb when the light changed to green. "Clint's not exactly a big fan of aliens," she said. "But you can't blame him." She hadn't explained Clint's role in Loki's master plan, rather letting John believe that Clint had been fighting at the Avengers' side during the entire battle. She was sure that John would have understood; but it was Clint's story, and she would not tell it without his permission.

"No, I get it. If my first encounter with aliens had been the Chitauri, I'd probably have been in the same boat." John shrugged. "Of course, I got the Wraith instead, which was worse."

"That's the second time you've mentioned the Wraith," Natasha said. She let John steer her into a busy coffee shop.

"We'll talk about it later," John promised. He set his briefcase on the counter as he ordered, never letting it out of his sight.

Natasha leaned against the counter and casually scanned the coffee shop. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary for New York. Natasha absently identified a few individuals who warranted further observation, and let John guide them to a table at the back of the shop, removed slightly from the others by a pillar.

Natasha took the chair that gave her the best view of room. John sat beside her, rather than across, which would let them speak confidentially. "Was there anything you wanted to ask?" John asked. Natasha supposed he meant questions about aliens and Stargates, but that wasn't what interested Natasha.

Instead, Natasha and leaned closer to John so no one could overhear as she asked, "What's going on between you and Tony?"

John glanced around the room, at the bar, anywhere but Natasha. "It's nothing."

Natasha let the silence sit between them, waiting as the waitress brought over two tiny cups of espresso and a small pitcher of steamed milk. The woman gave John a shy smile and went back to the coffee bar.

Natasha sipped at her coffee, let the bitter liquid flow over her tongue, and waited.

"We go back," John finally said. He poured enough milk into his cup to turn the coffee a pale tan. "I knew Tony at Stanford. No big deal."

"The way you two fight, makes me think that it is a big deal."

"What did Tony tell you?" John asked, taking a sip from his cup.

"That he knew you when you were at Stanford when you were nineteen," Natasha said. "But I can guess what he left out."

John met Natasha's gaze and held it. "What do you want to hear?"

"Whatever you want to tell me."

John looked back at his cup, tapped the porcelain handle as he tried to decide. Natasha sat and waited.

After a few minutes, John cleared his throat. "I, uh... Me and Tony, we were… together." He never looked up. "For a few months." John's fingers pressed on the porcelain saucer, almost masking the trembling. "But you know Tony. Something else caught his attention and it was over."

Natasha put her hand over John's, wondering if there was anything she could do about something that had happened twenty-three years before.

Part of her wasn't surprised by John's confession. She'd suspected as much since she'd seen Tony and John interact in the break-out room in Cheyenne Mountain. She'd known Tony was interested in men as well as women; anyone who could read knew about Tony's exploits from the tabloids.

Natasha hadn't known her son was that way; after all, he had been married to Nancy for several years, but the revelation did not surprise Natasha.

John held his shoulders with a tension that Natasha didn't understand. "It wouldn't have mattered. Like, we were discrete, mostly, but I guess someone found out and told Dad that summer."

"Oh," Natasha whispered. Given what she remembered about Patrick's opinions on non-traditional sexual orientation, she doubted he took the news well.

"Yeah, Dad was really pissed," John said. He was still staring at the table as if the surface held some sort of answer. "He totally lost it, said that I wasn't his son, that he didn't want any fucking faggot living under his roof. Threw me out right then and there."

Ice and anger swept through Natasha's head. "He said _what_?"

John mistook her fury. "Don't worry about it," he said. "I got my stuff and drove back to Palo Alto, got a job for the summer and went back to school in the fall. Stepmother Amanda invited me back for Thanksgiving in November like nothing had happened and me and Dad never talked about it again."

"John—"

"And I joined the Air Force and married Nancy and that was real, no matter how much I fucked things up with her later on," John continued in a rush. "The thing with Tony was just kids stuff, but then he had to go make bigger and better weapons and he _enjoyed_ it, and all the time I'm having to go in to rescue my men from friendly fire, and you know what name was always on those weapons?"

"Stark," Natasha said quietly.

"Yeah. And every time they sent me in after yet another soldier whose life was at risk from state-of-the-art armament that Tony created, it was just another dig at what had happened," John said.

"That you'd lost him?"

John's head snapped up at her words. "No," he said in disgust, "That I was ever involved with someone like _that_ to begin with."

His bereft expression belied his angry words, and Natasha held her tongue as John put his head in his hands. While she had no doubt that John was being honest about how much he detested the devastating effects of Stark weaponry, his reactions to Tony and their easy familiarity between episodes of bitter animosity, told Natasha that John's feelings for Tony had once been far deeper than he was letting on.

She was also very glad that John seemed to have brushed off Patrick Sheppard's words from so long ago.

"So yeah, that's the sad sordid history with me and Tony," John said. "Can we never talk about it again?"

"Of course," Natasha said, sitting back and taking another sip from her cup. By this time, the coffee had gone cold, but she drank it anyway.

John coughed. "So I guess this is the part where I ask if you and Tony ever..."

"Never," Natasha said quickly.

"Good," John said, relieved. "That would have been... weird."

He smiled at Natasha, eyes tired in his too-young face, and she had to smile back.

"So where do we go from here?" John asked. "You know what I do, now, and I know what you do. Do we like call? Email?"

"I expect that our lives will cross frequently," Natasha said honestly. "SHIELD will be interested to know what your people are doing, and I would not be surprised if the reciprocal is true as well."

"Yeah, no doubt," John said. "Look, you want another coffee?"

Natasha demurred, and she waited while John went back up to the counter. She was amused to note that he carried his briefcase of secrets with him, instead of leaving it at the table with her.

Smart boy, Natasha thought.

He retuned soon enough, briefcase in one hand and coffee in the other. "You're going to vibrate out of here if you keep that up," Natasha noted.

John shrugged. "They had me off coffee until just last week," he said around a slurp. "Still can't drink alcohol, doctor's orders." He caught the expression on Natasha's face, and tried to smile. "Don't worry about it, it's okay. Doc says I'm nearly at a hundred percent."

"Is that why the committee thought you had been compromised?" Natasha asked.

John set his cup down with a clatter. "What—" He stopped himself and breathed in, sudden anger dissipating. "You were talking to General O'Neill, he told you."

"He did," Natasha said evenly.

"Did he also tell you exactly what happened?"

"No. He suggested that I ask you."

John sat back in his chair. "Is that what this is? You're asking?"

Natasha leaned forward, putting her elbows on the table. "If you want to tell me , then yes."

She waited, watching the emotions cross John's face. Another person might not have seen anything, but she had been watching for reactions in men like him for a very long time.

After a minute, John rubbed his hand over his eyes. "What happened to me... let's just say that most people don't come back. And since I did, it must have been because of something I'd done, right?"

Natasha didn't offer platitudes. She could tell from his posture that John would not welcome them. Instead, she said, "Why did you make it out alive?"

John had gone pale. "I'd taken out a lot of the enemy since 2004," he said. "After all that, when _she_ got hold of me... it was about power. After all I'd done, this time she had me."

Natasha's pre-conceived notions of what had happened to John turned upside down, all in the gender of his captor. "What was her name?" Natasha demanded.

John smiled, a razor-sharp expression. "They don't have names. And after a while I didn't want to keep making things up to call her."

Natasha's mind made the connections that had been lying in front of her all afternoon. "Was she one of the Wraith you spoke of?"

John just looked at Natasha.

"How did you survive?" Natasha asked. She did not ask, _what did she do to you_ , because Natasha needed no help in imagining what a sentient being could do to torture another.

She had been on both sides of that coin.

John folded his hands together in his lap. "I just kept thinking, I had to stay alive. If I was alive, I still had a chance to beat her and get back home. Then everything would be all right again, you know?"

"What happened?" Natasha asked.

John let out a breath. He sounded so tired. "I got a chance to beat her, and I took it."

"I understand," Natasha said, and she did. She understood all the things that a person would do to survive, to beat the enemy, to utterly destroy them so that they could never hurt you again.

John nodded. "I guessed you would."

"How long did she have you?" Natasha asked.

"Five months," John said. He tapped his thumb against the tabletop. "Felt like a lifetime." He sat up. "Whatever. Now I get to go back to Colorado and wait for the General to find something else to keep me busy until they kick me to the curb again."

"Don't think like that," Natasha said. "This posting, it's temporary."

"So what if it is?" John asked. "It's not like I'm ever getting my city back. What the hell else am I supposed to do?"

It broke Natasha's heart to see her son so defeated. "John, you have to get up every day and do what you have to, until it doesn't hurt so much."

"What the hell would you know about it?" John demanded, and now his anger was aimed at her.

Natasha didn't respond. Her head was crowded with memories of everything she'd lost in her life. She thought about Coulson, but that wound was still so raw that even in her thoughts, she shied away. Instead, she remembered what it had been like to lose her son to the mission when he was just three year old, and only getting him back twenty-nine years later.

And for all that she had John back, it didn't change the fact that everything she had worked for so many years, her life's mission, everything she'd trained for, had been created for, had fallen to pieces when the Soviet Union collapsed, taking Department X and the Red Room down with it.

But she held on.

Until, eight years later, the only person binding her to the land of the living had been killed. The Winter Soldier had been her lover, her mentor, her friend. He'd trained her to hunt, to kill, but most importantly of all, the Winter Soldier had taught Natasha how to survive the harsh world they lived in.

In the years after his death, Natasha fell deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole, into death and destruction and annihilation, until finally she went too far and SHIELD sent Clint Barton to stop her. Clint found her and he should have killed her in that rainy alley, should have fired his gun directly into her heart.

Instead Clint gave her a chance to find her way back from the hell she'd created for herself, bringing her into SHIELD and saving her life. His choice gave Natasha back her _son_.

Natasha harbored no illusions about herself. She knew what she was, what she had done, and what she deserved.

She wasn't going to let this second chance pass her by.

"I've lost a lot over the years," was all she said to John. "But I'm still here, and that has to be enough."

John looked at Natasha for a moment before taking her hand. His fingers were ice-cold. "You've got me, for what it's worth," he said.  


Sudden tears came to Natasha's eyes. "That is worth everything," she told her son, meaning it with every fibre of her being.

John stood, and together they left the coffee shop, heading back to where John's car was parked at Stark Tower. As they walked, Natasha thought about her life and what she'd lost. In spite of the fact that Department X had made her into the Black Widow, she was glad they were gone. She had outlived the men who created her, and that was the only revenge she cared about.

Maybe it was the forcible reminder of Department X and the events in Seth's compound in Belarus, but Natasha hadn't been able to get the Winter Soldier from her waking thoughts, nor from her dreams.

He had been the most deadly operative Department X ever produced. Once the Winter Soldier was pointed at a target, there was no escape. He had been ruthless, efficient... inevitable.

He had trained Natasha as no other had, gave her the skills she needed to survive, to outwit every enemy. She would never say it aloud to anyone, but even after thirteen years, Natasha missed him terribly.

But it did not matter.

The Winter Soldier was dead, and nothing could bring the dead back to the land of the living.

Natasha slipped her hand through John's arm, and walked on.

 _end_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The thing is, if you look at the Stargate canon, the Asgard really did clone themselves. And all the other clones in the SG-verse (like the teen clone of Jack O'Neill, and the clone of Carson Beckett) never knew they were clones until someone pointed it out to them.
> 
> Stop looking at me like that, it could legit happen like this. 
> 
> Anyway this sets up everything to do with the sequel. See you in a bit.


End file.
